Recent stories of note:
Since 1996, the United Kingdom’s biggest painting museums have had a clear division of labor: the National Gallery displays paintings from the Middle Ages up to the year 1900, while Tate Modern focuses on collecting twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. That written agreement will soon be null and void, as the National Gallery has announced this week that it will be building a new wing dedicated to post-1900 modern art, as Martin Bailey reports. Scheduled to open in the early 2030s, the extension is estimated to cost £400 million, the vast majority of which has already been pledged by charitable foundations. Questions remain, however: given the astronomical sums major twentieth-century painters fetch at auction, what exactly will the National Gallery be able to collect in the next few years? If Picassos and Pollocks prove elusive, will Britain’s National Gallery follow the lead of its eponymous cousin across the pond and play host to overtly partisan and divisive contemporary artists?
“A world of possibility”
Lydia Wilson, The Times Literary Supplement
As Lydia Wilson notes in her review of Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom and Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers, ancient Mesopotamia might strike us as familiar. After all, the various Mesopotamian peoples, from the Sumerians to the Assyrians, invented much of civilization as we know it, from city life to wheeled vehicles. Still, Wilson warns us not to get too comfortable, urging us to remember just how different the Mesopotamian worldview was from ours. She notes, for instance, that the Assyrian school curriculum contained five major branches: astrology, exorcism, medicine, entrail divination, and lamentation. Even the very act of writing, which is Sumeria’s most enduring invention, had little to do with the modern practice: in Sumerian and Akkadian, phonetic similarities in words or similar-looking letters were thought to reflect profound cosmic truths, instead of merely being the subject of humorous puns.
“An Apology for Philology”
Solveig Lucia Gold & Joshua T. Katz, Antigone
In their latest for Antigone, the husband-and-wife team Solveig Lucia Gold and Joshua T. Katz have produced a point-by-point deconstruction of the “arguments” of those deconstructionist classicists who wish to abolish philology, and even classics itself. Gold and Katz not only expose these scholar-activists’ logical fallacies, which are often couched in layers of deliberately obscure jargon, but also lay bare the outright misrepresentation of ancient and modern evidence that characterizes much of “Critical Ancient World Studies.” It is especially ironic that the very people who would have us “decenter our whiteness” are attacking a discipline, philology, that seeks to decenter our own linguistic and cultural biases and preconceptions, in order to “get to the meaning of the word as it was originally written,” as the authors write. It seems that the battle for philology is part of a broader war on the very idea of objective truth, which some radical scholars seek to replace with pure power politics.
